WHAT HERITAGE DOES AND DOES NOT DO TO ... heritage does and does not do to identity... 51 Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre, ano 11, n. 23, p. 51-70, jan/jun 2005 WHAT HERITAGE

51What heritage does and does not do to identity...

Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre, ano 11, n. 23, p. 51-70, jan/jun 2005

WHAT HERITAGE DOES AND DOES NOT DO TO IDENTITY:SOME ANSWERS FROM AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

Eric GableUniversity of Mary Washington – United States of America

Abstract: This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectifyand enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call “communities of memory”in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts atcreating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounterbetween those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slaveryand race in the antebellum era in the United States and vernacular responses tosuch representations. It looks at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, whichrecently has made great efforts to make slaves prominent figures in the landscapesit reconstructs in on-site maps, tours, and literature. Of particular interest are thevarious ways that vernacular skepticism and cynicism about public portrayalscontinues to generate controversy at Monticello, and particularly at how thetopic of erasure and invisibility remain enduring themes in the popularimagination of what public history is all about when such history focuses onslavery and race. By interrogating public skepticism about official portrayals ofthe past, the paper moves towards a performative approach to studying whatheritage does to identity production rather than a representational approach.Among the identities that are produced at Monticello (and by extension otherantebellum sites) are racial and oppositional identities.

Keywords: heritage, official history, performance, skepticism.

Resumo: Este artigo explora a maneira com que administradores de sites sobreo patrimônio de uma era de escravidão objetivam e atuam como aquilo que foichamado de “comunidades de memória” por Robert Bellah et al. em um EstadosUnidos racialmente polarizado, bem como o modo com que o público interpretaos seus esforços de criar o que venha a ser a história oficial. Salienta-se oencontro muitas vezes controverso entre aqueles que estão encarregados dedivulgar representações públicas de escravidão e de raça no período anterior àGuerra Civil nos Estados Unidos com as respostas correntes a tais representações.O presente estudo volta seu olhar para Monticello, cidade natal de Thomas

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Jefferson, que recentemente tem feito um grande esforço para tornar os escravosfiguras preeminentes nas paisagens que a cidade reconstrói em mapas de sítioshistóricos, no turismo e na literatura. É especialmente interessante analisar asdiversas maneiras com que o ceticismo e o cinismo correntes acerca de retratospúblicos continua a gerar uma controvérsia em Monticello, e em particular omodo com que a rasura e a invisibilidade permanecendo sendo temas naimaginação popular do que seja a história pública quando tal história enfoca aescravidão e a raça. Questionando o ceticismo público sobre retratos oficiaisfeitos no passado, este artigo oferece uma abordagem que se filia à teoria daperformance e não à das representações sociais; o artigo apresenta, assim, umestudo das conseqüências do patrimônio herança sobre a produção deidentidade. Entre as identidades produzidas em Monticello (e por extensão emoutros sítios do período anterior à Guerra Civil norte-americana) estão aidentidade racial e as identidades em oposição.

Palavras-chave: ceticismo, história oficial, patrimônio, performance.

I would like to use some observations I have made over the past fifteenyears at a restored plantation in the Southern United States to make a fewcomments on what heritage sites do and do not do regarding identity. Identityis a hard to pin down concept, used perhaps way too much, defined, perhapsway too little, but generally deployed to refer to that sense persons have thatthey belong – that, for example, they identify with nation and with a nation’sauthorities. Heritage sites, as I am using the term, include buildings,monuments and museums, not to mention all those scattered pieces ofinhabited or once-inhabited landscape which governments have set aside –all those objects governments or private civic organizations have managed topreserve and protect; all those traces of the past that typify the public placesof modern nation-states everywhere (Blatti, 1987; Evans; Boswell, 1999;Karp; Kraemer; Lavine, 1992; Karp; Lavine, 1991; Sherman; Rogoff, 1994).Heritage (or “the past”) on display for edification and enjoyment is thequintessential feature of modernity. By the same token, identity – having one,not having one – is a quintessential problem of modernity.

Both scholars who work at heritage sites and those who study them ascultural phenomena assume that heritage does something significant to theconsciousnesses of those who visit such sites (Nanda, 2004; White 1997;



Yelvington, 2002). Critics of heritage sites argue that heritage is a vehicle forthe dissemination of “official history” that inculcates a misplaced patriotismwhile erasing or eliding a more nuanced (and therefore politically useful)understanding of the past. Celebrators of heritage sites argue that nationsneed collective identities or shared social memories for developing a better,more committed citizenry and that it is the job of the state to provide them(Kammen, 1997). Heritage shapes national identity by creating an “imaginedcommunity” (Anderson, 1991) or a “community of memory” (Bellah et. al.,1985; Lowenthal, 1985).

As such, both those who celebrate and critique such sites assume theirsignificance. They stress their representational power. But, if we studyheritage sites and museums as places of performance rather than as formsof representation, we might question both the sanguine and pessimistic viewsof what these sites do. After all, imagined communities are created from thebottom up, as the people who visit museums sometimes argue back at themessengers. Moreover, museums in democratic nation-states actively pursuetheir publics and occasionally cater to their desires because museums, likemodern democracies, are premised on the willing participation of a citizenry.As a result the history they produce is a cacophonous outcome of contestand compromise; it is a product of negotiations among the (at times deeplydivided) professional historians and the (often factionalized) public at large(Handler; Gable, 1997). Museums may be in the business of producingofficial history, but as the museum also tries to enact democracy, the historyit makes is inherently messy (Kurin, 1997).

History museum’s caretakers have a peculiar relationship with theirpublic in this managed “regime of knowledge” (Bennet, 1995). They are, asTony Bennett argues, at once gatekeepers, judging a public’s comportment,and facilitators, encouraging a public’s participation. Members of a publicwhose understanding of “the past” diverges too widely from the caretakers’own understanding might be dismissed on grounds of comportment becausein the context of the creation of a managed community of memory thesedissenters count as a kind of rabble. But caretakers might also feelcompelled to conform to their public’s rearranging of the past even when thepublic’s understanding seems at odds with authoritative knowledge (Gable,1997). In the United States and I would imagine elsewhere, because thepeople who manage history museums feel that they must make a democracyas much as represent its collective past, they are constantly monitoring their

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ongoing engagement with the public, testing, for example, whether the sitehas a representative or suitably diverse following or whether it seems tocater to one audience and not another (see Kurin, 1997). Arguments aboutwhat counts as “true” or “false” history reveal and even exacerbatetroubling differences among communities of “experts” and the public theyostensibly serve and educate. Yet, professional historians and educatedmembers of the public increasingly operate with a model of “history” inwhich history is not the past but a reflection of present day concerns andprejudices. It is also generally assumed that contradictory versions often co-exist and reflect the concerns of different factions within the publicinstitution (see Handler; Gable, 1997). A museum or heritage site that a“significant” segment of the public does not visit or a site that this publicloudly criticizes for using the cloak of authority to hide “the truth” can cometo be perceived by its caretakers as a failure and an embarrassment.

In recent years, at American slave-era heritage sites, black Americanshave acted as such a public, pressuring such sites’ caretakers to change theway slaves and slavery are incorporated into America’s pedagogic landscape(Horton; Crew, 1989). This is clearly the case at Monticello – a plantationand the home of Thomas Jefferson, one of founding fathers of the UnitedStates – as I came to know it from ethnographic observations of what incultural studies is called “performance,” or more prosaically, the waysvisitors and the site’s caretakers interact with one another, and from listeningto what they say about such encounters. My ethnographic account is,however, truncated. I began observing Monticello when I went to work thereas a “Visitor Services Specialist” from March 1988 to November 1988. Itook notes of conversations I had with employees and visitors with an eyetoward an ethnography of this American shrine. In 1989 Richard Handlerand I wrote an article describing the dilemmas museums like Monticello andColonial Williamsburg face as they attempt to enact contradictory egalitarianvalues in the ways they treat the visiting public. We also applied for fundingto study these two institutions in depth. After reading our proposal and ourpaper, the leadership at Monticello decided that, because the museum wasalready “over-assessed,” our study would not serve its interests, andtherefore denied our request to carry out research there. We went on tocarry out fieldwork at Colonial Williamsburg exclusively. Nevertheless, Dr.Jordan, the current Director of the Foundation, agreed to be formallyinterviewed on two occasions in 1992. This essay combines elements from



those interviews along with what I learned while I worked at Monticello andwhat I continued to learn in subsequent years from friends andacquaintances among Monticello’s employees with whom I have stayed inclose contact. It also includes what I have gathered from public sources. Ishould note that all quotes from conversations are from written notes I tookat the time or from transcriptions of the tape-recorded conversations I hadwith Dr. Jordan.

When I started observing Monticello in 1988, I witnessed the beginningsof a major shift. The site’s caretakers were compelled not only to tell thecelebratory story of Jefferson’s life and achievements, but also to representslaves as historical actors in their own right; and they began to quietlychange what they were willing to entertain about Sally Hemings, a mulattoslave who many Americans, and especially African-Americans, believed hada long-standing liaison with Thomas Jefferson. In early 1988 staff on the sitewere still treating this story as a myth not worthy of sustained discussion.By 1998 discussion of the liaison is a major theme in the site’s verbal, textualand visual reconstruction of antebellum race relations. This ostensibly wasbecause of a DNA study publicized in that year that showed the geneticconnection between Jefferson and the descendents of Hemings (Foster;Tyler-Smith, 1998). But that study would never have been done were it notfor what happened a few years before as African-Americans used the siteto indict publicly the history of Monticello as a sham. I will focus on howthe site’s caretakers either were swayed by or dismissed public skepticismabout the way the Foundation chose to deal with the purported liaisonbetween Jefferson and Hemings. By looking at shifts in institutional policyon the liaison, I will illustrate the contested nature of official history inmodern democracies, the way such contests are enacted in museumpractice, and by extension what heritage does and does not do.

The site

Monticello is one of dozens of slave-era plantation houses which werebought in the first decades of the twentieth century by philanthropicorganizations for the edification and enjoyment of the public (Peterson, 1960;West, 2001). But Monticello is a unique slave-era plantation because it wasthe residence of Thomas Jefferson; and the motto of the Foundation thatruns the heritage site is to “preserve and maintain Monticello… as a national

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shrine and to perpetuate the memory of Thomas Jefferson and thoseprinciples for which he contended.” “Those principles”, guides at Monticellowill tell you, are embodied in the three things for which Jefferson wanted tobe remembered. He wrote Virginia’s statute for religious freedom, he wasthe founder of the University of Virginia – one of the first publicly fundedinstitutions of higher education whose core moral principles emerged out ofenlightenment humanism rather than an association with a Christian faith –and, above all, he was the author of The Declaration of Independence. It isfrom these three acts, and primarily for his authorship of the Declaration ofIndependence, that the Foundation – and to some extent the public –adduces “those principles for which he contended”. What is stressed isJefferson’s role as a founder of American political values – individualfreedom, equality of opportunity, the pursuit of happiness.

The Foundation also stresses Jefferson’s preoccupation with intellectualand aesthetic pleasure – his love of gadgets, art, literature, music, gardens,architecture, archeology, science, food. Indeed, the over half a millionvisitors a year who take a twenty-five minute tour of the house and spendperhaps an hour exploring the grounds are more likely to learn details ofJefferson’s aesthetic interests than of his political principles. While in thehouse, they are treated to brief vignettes about mechanical wonders such asthe Great Clock whose weights, one for each day, disappear into a hole cutinto the floor. They are allowed a glimpse of the narrow stairways that leadto the “invisible” upper floors and the mysterious dome or “sky” room thatnone of the general public will ever see. But mainly there are books,paintings, musical instruments, furniture, wallpaper; and outside, flowersfrom around the world. Visitors receive a quintessential “house and garden”tour – with Jefferson playing invisible host.

At Monticello, Jefferson’s pursuit of knowledge and aesthetic pleasureshave been portrayed as both a sign of and a reward for his success at livinga life according to the civic virtues he authored. Yet, because ThomasJefferson was a slave-owner, this celebratory narrative has always beenpotentially threatened. Jefferson’s particular freedom to pursue happiness forhimself and his family could be linked to emiseration of others. Or Jeffersoncould be dismissed as a hypocrite whose lofty words did not match hisdeeds. Over the years I was familiar with Monticello, these criticismsoccasionally surfaced in encounters the site’s staff had with scholars in thewider knowledge-producing community. In these encounters historians and



archaeologists suggested informally and privately that Monticello considerreconstructing slave quarters on the site to make it easier for visitors toexperience Monticello as a “working plantation”. In the 1980s and 1990s thecriticisms of Monticello and Jefferson crystallized in the popular imagination,around an illicit sexual liaison Thomas Jefferson allegedly had with a slave,Sally Hemings. That Jefferson denied having a long affair with an enslavedwoman and denied any substantive connection to their several offspringcould exemplify, at once, the typical hypocrisies of the politically powerful,the particular duplicities and fundamental inequities of race-based slavery,and – as “official history” continued to dismiss these stories – a sign of anongoing cover-up.

Interpreting a performance: defending Jefferson’s reputation

In 1988 when I began research at Monticello I was intrigued by theFoundation’s response to visitors’ often pointed interrogation of Jefferson’srelationship with Sally Hemings. I was interested in how the ongoing act ofrepresenting a particular version of the past compelled a certaincomportment among the site’s caretakers and visitors alike. My assumptionwas that Monticello’s ongoing conversation with its public would also entailteaching and learning a particular etiquette. This etiquette emerged out ofthe place museums typically occupy in modern democracies, the“exhibitionary complex”, as Tony Bennett so deftly characterizes it.

To tease out the significance of museums in modernity, Bennettcompares “the exhibitionary complex” (which includes art galleries,expositions and department stores as well as museums) to Foucault’s“carceral archipelago” – the system of prisons, insane asylums and the like– which also has its origins in modernity. Prisons, Foucault famously argued,turned an opaque populace – thieves, murderers and other threats to publicpeace, hidden in the poor sections of the city or in the forests beyond thestate’s highways – into a visible and monitorable group. Museums, Bennettargues, made another populace into a citizenry – people who learned to lookat the world through the eyes of power and as a result internalized that wayof looking.

Not that the proprietors of increasingly open museums trusted theircitizenry to behave themselves. Bennett reminds us that the rise of themodern museum arose from an ongoing conflict between reformers,

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emphasizing that the crowd can be educated not to be unruly, and elitists,ever fearful that the crowd will act like a mob, that they will touch and dodamage to, rather than look. Because of this ambivalence about their public,Bennett notes, the democratizing museum inevitably fails to live up to aninstitution’s own internally generated goals. The wish to “reform” is drivenby two internally generated principles – “the first…sustaining the demandthat museums should be open and accessible to all… the second… thatmuseums should adequately represent the cultures and values of differentsections of the public.” These institutional imperatives lead to “insatiable”(that is never satisfied, but always crying out for satisfaction) demands forreform and endless talk (often self-serving) that reforms are occurring, thatprogress is, despite inevitable set-backs and obstacles, happening. Museumsare supposed to be universal. If they are about “man”, they are about allgroups of human-beings. Groups who feel excluded can make claims –based on the museum’s own morally binding goals – for inclusion (Bennett,1995, p. 90).

Reforming museums claim, as Bennett puts it, to address a “publicmade up of formal equals” but end up making distinctions. The door is open,but not everyone seems willing to or proves capable of going through. Ifmuseums are places where a public learns to look but not touch, if they aresites where a public learns to become bourgeois, they are also places wherecaretakers come to assume as inevitable specific ways of governing ormanaging a public.

At Monticello I was particularly interested in what in museum parlanceare called frontline employees – guides and other staff who convey the site’sstories to the public. Guides, during the period of my research, tended to bemiddle-aged women of a certain cultured quality and education that wouldmark them as upper-middle class. There were also young men and women– recent graduates of university history and literature departments – barelyscraping by on a meager guide’s salary, and some of the older women weredivorcees or in otherwise straitened circumstances, but they all maintaineda cultured look and comportment. They were invariably “courteous” but theylooked down their noses at such places as Colonial Williamsburg, whereguides had to be artificially friendly to visitors and had to dress in periodcostume and speak in period accents. At Monticello, they dressed up ratherthan down. Their “uniform” was an idealized borrowing from the style of thecountry gentlewoman or gentleman. And when they retired from the public



eye to have lunch together in the guides’ kitchen, they ate meals thatrequired a fork and knife or spoon, not sloppy sandwiches and the like. Ifound them congenial company. I wanted to ascertain how their encounterswith the public led them to incorporate a certain lived attitude toward “thepublic”.

To hear them talk, hardly a day went by when the site’s guides werenot asked by some visitor about “Sally Hemings”, Jefferson’s “slavemistress” or Jefferson’s “other” (meaning unacknowledged) children. Oftenas not, the visitor would phrase the question in an accusatory or mockingtone – the kind of tone I associate with reporters at White-House pressconferences when the event turns stonewalling into a kind of theater. Andindeed, the guides’ general response – the response their superiorsencouraged them to make – sounded a lot like stonewalling. The guides Iobserved or talked with discounted the story as a kind of “rumor” byinvoking the authority of “professional historians”.

What they said emerged out of their appraisal of what motivated thepublic to ask such questions. But it also reflected what they had been taught.This is what they learned, for example, in the in-house compilation offrequently asked questions written specifically for guides, under the section,“What is the truth about Jefferson and the slave Sally Hemings?”

The allegation that Sally was Jefferson’s mistress and bore his children wasfirst published by a vengeful journalist… in 1802. Fawn Brodie’s biographyof Jefferson and a novel by Barbara Chase-Riboud have recently reiteratedthis claim [(Brodie, 1974; Chase-Riboud, 1979)]. Although it is impossible toprove either side of the question, serious Jefferson scholars are unanimousin discounting the truth of such a liaison. In the opinion of Jefferson’sbiographer, Dumas Malone, it would have been totally out of character and“virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards and habitualconduct”. (Stanton, 1987, p. 20).

The official position the guides were taught was ostensibly non-committal – ”impossible to prove either side of the question”. Yet thistraining document juxtaposes the authority of “serious Jefferson scholars”with a “vengeful journalist”, and a bestseller “novel” with the authority ofJefferson’s most famous biographer.

So, it is not surprising that many of the guides interpreted visitors’persistent preoccupation with this sexual liaison as graphic evidence of the

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low appetite for scandal. As guides often put it, the public “wants to knockalabaster statues off their pedestals”. Or the guides construed pesteringqueries as reflecting a barely concealed desire among the public to besmirchthe Monticello Foundation’s reputation. Guides often complained to me thataggressive if transparently sly questions such as “But what about Jefferson’sother children?” made it “impossible”, to do anything but react defensively.As one guide remarked, “a little while ago a visitor asked a guide (who hadjust finished her tour), `what did you tell them about Thomas Jeffersonscrewing colored girls?’ Now, how are you going to answer a question likethat?” – without, the guide didn’t need to add, becoming complicit in racialslurs or sexual crudities.

If an interest in discussing Sally Heming’s sexual liaison with Jeffersonwas a sign of poor manners that could occasionally be dismissed as bigoted,some guides also believed that such questions also reflected a general, ifmisplaced, obsession with secrecy. Visitors often talked as if the upper floorsof the house (especially the dome room), which are off limits to the generalpublic, were secret chambers that contained important artifacts purposelykept hidden. People would get off the bus and want immediately to bedirected to the “hidden” passages that they assumed honeycombed thehouse and grounds. These secret passageways and rooms were oftenassociated in the popular imagination with Sally Hemings. Guides complainedthat visitors would occasionally pester them to show the “secret room” justabove Jefferson’s bed where Sally Hemings had remained hidden andwaiting to answer his call. Some wanted the guides to show them theingenious system of pulleys which allowed Jefferson to hoist his bed up intothis secret cubby hole. Others asked to see the air tunnels they thought ledto secret and distant locations for the love tryst. Usually such requests werecountered with a courteous, if often icy, resort to a “just-the-facts”accounting. For example, those underground air-tunnels, they would tell thevisitor, were “in fact” ingenious because they let fresh air circulate to priviessituated close to the house. One guide remarked:

After one tour a woman came up to me and demanded to know why we didn’tmention anything about the secret passageway to Michie’s Tavern. I wouldlike just once to wink or to give some sign…to pretend just once that thesecret does exist, that the Foundation is part of some vast secret conspiracyto keep the truth from the people (but) because of some flash of communionwith this particular visitor I’m going to lift the veil and reveal it all.



As this guide saw it, visitors in pursuit of the secret of Sally Hemingswere asserting the existence of a body of knowledge kept purposely out ofthe public domain. The guide also recognized that when she and hercolleagues routinely dismissed the Hemings story as “fiction”, or counteredqueries about the site’s invisible passages and hidden chambers with a dry“just-the facts” response, they simply confirmed this suspicion.

In sum, guides learned the implicit lesson that in any democracy, nomatter how open, there will always be a minority who believe in “conspiracytheories”. Monticello was the perfect terrain upon which to enact suchtheories. Guides, who stood in an intermediary position between the publicand museum leadership, developed an exaggerated faith in the truth ofofficial knowledge as they found themselves compelled to act as guardiansof the reputation of an exemplary figure and of the institution itself.

African Americans and Monticello

During the years that Monticello’s guides were incessantly pestered bywhite visitors about Sally Hemings, the Foundation’s leadership was trying tomake the site more congenial to African Americans. The site’s caretakerswere embarrassed that there were so few black visitors to the mountaintop.The Foundation’s director Daniel Jordan, the research historian LuciaStanton, and the site’s archeologist William Kelso all argued that ifMonticello would focus more on the contributions of the hundreds of slaveswho shared the mountaintop with Jefferson, then more African Americanswould visit. In a 1992 interview, Jordan explained to me that for a long time“slavery was the “‘s’ word” among the guides who preferred the lessexplicit euphemism “servants”. In the Foundation’s early days, members ofthe often implicitly segregationist “white identity” organizations – the“Daughters of the American Revolution” and the “United Daughters of theConfederacy” – served in rotation on Saturdays, Sundays and legal holidays,while black doormen in livery continued to greet tourists at the East Porticodoor. And gentility in whiteface continued to be a hallmark of the site longafter these organizations ceased to have an official presence at Monticello.

To rectify the errors of the institution’s past and to make the site morecongenial to African-Americans, Jordon and his staff tried to representslaves and slavery in the texts and images it produced. The Foundation alsomade efforts to reach out to the African-American community by inviting

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prominent African-Americans to speak at public events such as the July 4thnaturalization ceremony. Most significantly, in 1992, the museum hosted areunion of the Woodson family, whose members claimed to be descendantsof Tom Woodson, the putative first and purposely unrecorded child ofThomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. By looking at this event, we can seehow Monticello, with its status as a site for the production of public history,could become a location for public contestation of that history, a contestationwhich is performed or enacted. During the reunion the Woodsons wouldquestion the official version of history to call attention to the generallydisenfranchised status of African Americans in the national imaginedcommunity.

The Woodsons for their part insured that the event would be televisedby NBC national news. There, the reunion was portrayed as an antagonisticencounter with the Hemings story resonating as a kind of exposé. TheWoodson family, so the announcer said, came to Monticello “to claim whatthey say is their plantation”. As such the Woodsons echoed what the politicalactivist Jesse Jackson had said about Monticello on a visit that occurredshortly before the Woodsons made their appearance. Jackson accusedMonticello of “throwing sand on the fires of history” because it failed to givecredence to the love affair between Hemings and Jefferson or mention theoffspring they created together. To Jackson (and to many other AfricanAmerican intellectuals), Monticello’s squeamishness was symbolic of theinability of white America to accept black America as a part of the sameover-arching national family. Like Jackson, the Woodsons asserted thatMonticello had not been forthcoming in addressing their claims. Exposingmiscegenation kept secret could be seen as central to telling a story ofkinship denied.

The Woodsons, in short, portrayed Monticello as a typical whiteestablishment villain. And every Monticello employee I talked to after theevent agreed that the Foundation had taken a public relations beating onnational television. Yet, Monticello did not expect the Woodsons to produce(with NBC’s collusion) the generally derogatory sound-bites that would bebroadcast to the nation. In an interview I had with Jordan several monthsbefore the event, he talked about the Woodson reunion with considerableenthusiasm – “a milestone in Monticello’s dealing with this part of history”.As he listed all the things Monticello was doing to focus more on slave lifehe exclaimed:



I think a wonderful thing is going to happen next spring. That is, we believewe’re going to have a reunion here of the descendants of some Monticelloslaves… We participated in Black History Week this year and (our researchhistorian) gave a wonderful talk…to a packed house…And she led them ona walk along Mulberry Row and explained to them what took place when, andhow much we do know about these people – a lot. And this guy (who plansthe Woodson reunion) was in the audience and has become a friend. Andhe mentioned the possibility of a reunion and I said, ‘Gosh that’s a wonderfulidea.’ So he’s coming next week, and we’re having lunch. And we’re goingto plan this homecoming and we’re going to do everything that we can tosee that it happens…

The homecoming Jordan envisaged was to have been a quiet one. TheWoodsons would get a private tour of Monticello, the kind of tour theFoundation gives routinely to people they call “persons of stature” –corporate and governmental VIPs, and the hundreds of Jefferson’slegitimate descendants who hold their annual reunion at the family cemeteryon Jefferson’s birthday. The Woodsons would also be feted to a picnic lunchat the satellite plantation of Shadwell. But the discreet attempt at inclusionbecame, when the Woodsons invited the press, a public reenactment ofexclusion.

Why then did the televised version of this event become an antagonisticencounter rather than the “homecoming” of new friends that Jordanportrayed himself anticipating in his interview with me? Initially I thoughtthat it was because the Foundation was not aware of the Woodsons’genealogical claims. (Note that in the excerpt above the Woodsons arecharacterized as “the descendants of some Monticello slaves”). But in aninterview after the visit, Jordan insisted that he knew all along about theirputative ancestry. In that encounter I was impressed more than anything byhis befuddlement with the public’s continued preoccupation with the SallyHemings story.

Jordan remarked that “Jefferson”, (like the Foundation), “would neverduck any tough questions like race. But, on the other hand he’s a man forthe ages… and we don’t want to be too provincial in this stewardship.”Andin some sense his status as slaveholder might count as a provincial issue, anissue that associated Monticello with “the South”, as compared to, forexample, his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, an achievementof global significance.

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But just as importantly, Jordan simply believed that “serious scholars”were similarly dismissive of the issue. He reminded me that the historianJohn Chester Miller, who had often been a critic of Jefferson the slaveholder,and who had also privately criticized Monticello’s treatment of the topic ofslavery (he had been a “friendly gadfly” as one staff member put it to me)“wrote a whole chapter demolishing the liaison”. But he also noted that“Monticello sells more copies of Fawn Brodie than any bookstore inAmerica.” Jordan was referring to the bestselling work of “psychologicalhistory” that went a long way in publicizing the liaison as “fact,” and that theFoundation explicitly dismissed as unsubstantiated guesswork. Jordan madethis remark to emphasize that Monticello was tolerant of a diversity ofopinions. But he stressed that Monticello did not modify the way it respondedto the public’s interest in the Hemings story either in reaction to criticism orin response to consumer preference. He said that if there were ever hardevidence of the liaison, then the Foundation would tell the truth no matterhow controversial, but “right now, we just don’t know”. Nevertheless, indiscussing the Woodson family’s claims, he wanted to be sure that I knewthat, “I respect their oral tradition”.

Where the truth lies

To respect an oral tradition while at the same time maintaining ajudicious “agnosticism” (as it is often described by historians writing on thetopic) on the issue of the liaison entailed a peculiar construction of an officialcommunity of memory at the site. It privileged, if inadvertently, a certain kindof “serious scholarship” as standing for the final word as far as “professionalknowledge” is concerned; it allowed for contestation of that knowledge, butonly as that knowledge is subtly marked as different, “other”, “oral”traditions passed down through the generations as a kind of collectivememory among “other” people.1

1 It is instructive to compare white and black historians before the DNA evidence made itharder not to conclude that Jefferson and Hemings had a long sexual liaison. Joseph, J. Ellis(1997), while claiming to a certain agnosticism on the topic, concluded that “within thescholarly world and especially within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems tobe clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. Within the much murkier worldof popular opinion, especially within the black community, the story seems to have achievedthe status of self-evident truth” (Ellis, 1997, p. 303). Ellis counts himself as a member of



what he calls “the scholarly world” because for him too the “likelihood of a liaison isremote” (Ellis, 1997, p. 303). The African American legal scholar Annette Gordan-Reed’s(1997) brilliant and meticulously argued case for Jefferson’s paternity should be read as Ellis’opposite. It is a generally accepted argument among African-American intellectuals andhistorians that Jefferson’s liaison was a fact and its cover-up a signal example of the moregeneral tendency in the white community to deny such relationships. Indeed, it could beargued that such a history of denial is at the root of the invention and maintenance ofdistinct racial categories in America.

New evidence of the officially recognized kind was, however,eventually produced, in large measure because the Woodsons continued topress their claim, provoking a collection of DNA from themselves, otherHemings descendents, and descendents of Thomas Jefferson’s “white”family. When the journal Nature published an analysis the DNA evidence(along with an editorial by the historian Joseph Ellis, who compared ThomasJefferson’s sexual transgressions to President Clinton’s with MonicaLewinsky) in November 1998, Dr. Jordon (who knew about the article inadvance) immediately held a news conference to accept the report as thetruth. What Jordon did not address in that news conference was the fate ofthe Woodson family’s claim to a connection to Jefferson, a claim which,ironically, was also ostensibly disproved by the same DNA evidence thatproved the Hemings–Jefferson liaison. In the months following, theWoodsons would complain loudly to who ever listened that they trusted theDNA evidence as little as they had once trusted those who had relegatedtheir memory to the status of rumor. As a result of their complaining, asmuch as because of the DNA results, the Woodsons would also quickly losetheir cachet at Monticello.

I witnessed the last public occasion that the Woodson descendentswould be invited to the site. Scholars were presenting evaluations ofMonticello’s role in remaking the American imagined community, ineffecting, as one of the panelists, the director of Monticello’s guides, put it,“healing” between blacks and whites. Now that Sally Hemings had takenher place alongside Thomas Jefferson, black and white Americans couldrecognize that they were a single “family”. By accepting the truth of theDNA tests, Monticello had become a locus of racial reconciliation.

Then Byron Woodson spoke. His story was more critical thancelebratory. He argued that the DNA test had been “hijacked” by Clintonsupporters to “save his presidency” by comparing Clinton’s peccadilloes withMonica Lewinsky to Jefferson’s liaison with Hemings. Byron Woodson

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emphasized that this kind of hijacking of black history for white purposes“has been going on for too long” and was still going on. Later, ByronWoodson would publish a book, A President in the Family: ThomasJefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson (Woodson, 2001). In ithe would make several accusations of cover-up, and concluding with acritique of the duplicities of official history:

Ultimately, however, the Hemings/Jefferson controversy will not beresolved…with a bogus headline in Nature, not in a press conference calledby the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation… It will be resolved by afamily – my family. (Woodson, 2001, p. 251).

Conclusion

When scholars study history museums to see what they do to theidentities of publics that visit them they usually treat the site as a collage oftexts to be read as “representations” of the ideology of official history. Butwe can also consider the museum as a kind of theatre where guides andvisitors alike perform. Such performances can be interpreted for what theytell us about making citizens, about making publics in democracies – abouthow identity as an act. In the first approach a history museum produces theideas about the past that an “imagined community” holds (more or less) incommon. In the second approach, the museum produces a certain kind ofcomportment which can be resisted or contested. It is this secondmethodological approach that I have employed here. What can we learnfrom the two sets of performances I have sketched above – first, the dayto day encounters that occurred between guides and visitors, and second, adramatic event involving African American appropriations of the site?

Above all, it is clear that official history is being constantly questioned.When the members of the Woodson family stand on Mulberry Row andcomplain to Monticello’s chief research historian that their tour has been a“glaring disappointment” because their ancestor, Tom Woodson, was notmentioned along with Jefferson’s other children, they are questioning theofficial terrain at Monticello. When visitors ask the niggling question aboutSally Hemings, they, too, are subverting official history. Some of these,doubtless, want their suspicions confirmed that in things American there isalways a conspiracy afoot. Others probably get a certain bigoted pleasure



in being able to assert in public that even the sanctimonious are “screwingcolored girls”. Such questioning has a variety of effects, among them thatMonticello has been able to dismiss much public criticism as evidence ofpublic inferiority, a symptom of a more pervasive ignorance among themasses at large. As such, the performative space of Monticello confirms afairly standard (and secretly cynical) attitude “experts” in democracies haveabout the public in general. They are ignorant, so they need guidance.

But occasionally public criticism has to be taken more seriously. Ifwhite visitors could be dismissed for believing in the liaison between SallyHemings and Jefferson, black visitors could not so easily be shrugged off,precisely because their absence from the site was itself an indictment of itsdemocratic pretensions. Yet, such efforts can also be interpreted by a cynicalpublic (and cynical insiders as well) as no more than a public relations ploy.After the news conference in which Dr. Jordon accepted the DNA evidencea member of Monticello’s staff would remark privately to me that the newsallowed for a public relations windfall because, out of the hundreds ofarticles that were in the national press, most would remark favorably aboutMonticello’s admirable lack of defensiveness in accepting with alacrity theverdict of science on an old and festering controversy.

Caretakers at Monticello cannot help but want to celebrate their ownimpartiality and to downplay the contested nature of history itself, even in theface of clear evidence to the contrary. A vernacular skepticism about themotives and truth of public history results. In the vernacular view, officialhistory will always be a whitewash. Like the Stalinist history Milan Kunderaexposes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, an official narrative isa photograph out of which the purged politico has been airbrushed. ThatMonticello produces official history in this pejorative sense is what many ofMonticello’s visitors persist in believing, even as the Foundation attempts tobe more inclusive and more attentive to the sensitivities and demands ofhitherto ignored constituencies. This, in the end, is the lesson the Woodsonslearned. One imagines that their experience continues to exemplify whatmany African Americans believe about sites such as Monticello.

What can museum professionals do about this? Will they ever be ableto produce a past that makes for a more inclusive community of memory,a past that would create and maintain a more cohesive identity? I wouldargue that the solution lies in a much more radical form of honesty than iscurrent practice at Monticello and places like it. Monticello needs ultimately

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to convey its past complicities in history’s inevitable erasures. To Jordon andother caretakers of Monticello, the landscape they preside over is a more orless accurate if partial facsimile of the truth. They strive, they constantlyassert, to make a hitherto hidden landscape more visible, truer, as they siftthrough the evidence and listen to the testimony of experts. But they alsowant “the public” to applaud their efforts – to trust them as “stewards”, asJordon put it to me, of a collective past. This requires an inevitable erasurewhich is far more subtle than the crude airbrushing of totalitarian regimes.At Monticello, this erasure entails purging from the public memory of thesite, not only the profundity of disagreements among the public about whatcounts as history (whether slavery or the Declaration of Independence is themore important story), but the contested nature of history making itself(which is never as disinterested and objective as Jordon’s acceptance of thefait accompli of the DNA evidence would make it appear) in favor ofcommemorating its calculated objectivity. As a result, Monticello, perhapsbecause of its desire for consensus, ends up producing two parallellandscapes that together add up to the terrain of modern democracy: avisible landscape of shared knowledge without controversy or conflict, andan invisible landscape of suspicion, mistrust, and paranoia.

References

ANDERSON, B. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin andspread of nationalism. Verso: New York, 1991.BELLAH, R. et al. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment inAmerican life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.BENNETT, T. The birth of the museum: history, theory, politics. New York:Routledge, 1995.BLATTI, J. (Ed.). Past meets present: essays about historic interpretationand public audiences. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987.BRODIE, F. Thomas Jefferson: an intimate history. New York: W.W.Norton, 1974.CHASE-RIBOUD, B. Sally Hemings. New York: St. Martins Press, 1979.ELLIS, J. J. American sphinx: the character of Thomas Jefferson. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.



EVANS, J.; BOSWELL, D. (Ed.). Representing the nation: a reader:histories, heritage, and museums. London: Routledge, 1999.FOSTER, E. A.; TYLER-SMITH, C. Jefferson fathered slave’s last child.Nature, p. 27-28, Nov. 5, 1998.GABLE, E. Making a public to remake the past at Colonial Williamsburg.Museum Anthropology, 21, n. 2, p. 1-13, 1997.GORDON-REED, A. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: an Americancontroversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.HANDLER, R.; GABLE, Eric. The new history in an old museum:representing the past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1997.HORTON, James Oliver; CREW, Spencer R. Afro-Americans andMuseums: towards a policy of inclusion. In: LEON, Warren;ROSENZWEIG, Roy (Ed.). History museums in the United States: acritical assessment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. p. 215-236.KAMMEN, Michael. In the past lane: historical perspectives on Americanculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.KARP, I.; LAVINE, S. D. (Ed.). Exhibiting cultures: the poetics andpolitics of museum displays. Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,1991.KARP, I.; KRAEMER, C.; LAVINE, S. D. Lavine (Ed.). Museums andcommunities: the politics of public culture. Washington D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1992.KURIN, R. Reflections of a culture broker: a view from the Smithsonian.Washington D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.LOWENTHAL, D. The past is a foreign country. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985.MILLER, J. C. The wolf by the ears: Thomas Jefferson and slavery.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977.NANDA, Serenda. South African museums and the creation of a nationalidentity. American Anthropologist, 106, n. 2, p. 379-385, 2004.PETERSON, M. The Jefferson image in the American mind. New York:Oxford University Press, 1960.

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SHERMAN, Daniel; ROGOFF, I. (Ed.). Museum culture: histories,discourses, spectacles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.STANTON, L. Monticello: facts and figures. Charlottesville: ThomasJefferson Memorial Foundation, 1987.WEST, P. Domesticating history: the political origins of America’s housemuseums. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.WHITE, G. M. Introduction: public history and national narrative. MuseumAnthropology, 21, n. 1, p. 3-7, 1997.WOODSON, B. W. A president in the family: Thomas Jefferson, SallyHemings and Thomas Woodson. Westport: Praeger, 2001.YELVINGTON, K. History, memory and identity: a programmaticproglemenon. Critique of Anthropology, 22, n. 3, p. 227-256, 2002.

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